Warner Losh wrote:

> How would it be any different than today?  Every few hundred years, the 
> government moves the time zone.  Heck, they do that now every few years 
> anyway.  Each government would be able to move it as they saw fit, or follow 
> other government's leads.  If the US move and Canada doesn't, then what's the 
> harm?

A) It would be taking what is currently a doubly indirect pointer and removing 
the layer in the middle.  Dereferencing (converting to UTC) would no longer 
return a timescale stationary with respect to the synodic day.  A robust system 
with innumerable connections across interfaces and stakeholders worldwide would 
be made brittle.

B) Detailed expert knowledge would become necessary to answer even simple 
questions of comparing both clock intervals and Earth orientation questions 
either in a single place or across epochs and locations.  "What year did 
Queensland shift from NEW-UTC+10h to NEW-UTC+10h30m?  No, no!  The second time?"

C) As pointed out on numerous occasions in the past, these kaleidoscopic 
timezones would accelerate quadratically just like leap seconds.

D) It is asserted that interval timekeeping is hard to do.  This would make it 
orders of magnitude more difficult for many classes of use cases.  It ain't all 
about surfing the current instant into a future so bright we have to wear 
shades.  (And I'm skeptical that sacrificing the UTC baby to the dingo on the 
beach really improves the surfing anyway.)

> I don't disagree that there's no plan.

Another point of consensus!

Rob


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